Workflow Approvals Dashboard

This article is not strictly Nintex, as it could apply to any workflow engine.

We manage our Change Control process using InfoPath forms and Nintex workflow.

For a management overview and reminder for when approval request emails are missed, we needed a dashboard page that would show all outstanding approvals and those assigned to the current user.

Two methods were identified to provide this functionality – the Nintex webparts and custom list views of the WorkflowTasks list.

This is a summary of our requirements

Requirement

Nintex Webpart

Custom Listview

Display the ID of the item being approved

N

N

Link the item being approved to open in the browser

Y

N

Group all approvals for each item

N

Y

Ability to Approve from the page

Y

Y

Ability to Delegate from the page

N

Y

Whilst the Nintex webpart allows the current user to respond to a task if s/he is the one to whom the task was assigned, the Terminate Workflow option is visible and could cause problems - and the Delegate user was not available at al.

Our first attempt to solve this was to add a column to the WorkflowTask list and have a workflow paste in the relevant information each time a task was created. Big mistake – we had no end of ‘Task is locked by a workflow’ errors and resulted in delays of hours before an approval could be given.

'There are no items to show in this view of the "Workflow Tasks" list. To add a new item, click "New".'

To show

'You have no outstanding approvals'

We wanted to be able to show the ID of the related content.

Research indicated that SP 2013 held a field called WorkflowItemId – a Content Query webpart (CQWP) was created using the debugging style to retrieve a field of this name and found it existed in SharePoint 2010 and was populated with the ID value.

The next thing was to show it in the view – this field is not selectable as it is hidden. The answer was to export the ListView webpart (see Export a List Webpart at the end) and edit the embedded view

This makes it a lot easier to read, understand and amend – this will need to be re-edited to remove unnecessary whitespace and carriage returns, then html encoded (or the tag can be set up to be a CDATA entry).

I recommend that you use the field Status as a substitute field, then find/replace it with WorkflowItemId – this should prevent errors when editing the encoded xml.

So the new field WorkflowItemId is added to the view fields and used as the Group By value.

After the webpart(s) have been re-uploaded, if you Edit Webpart and Edit current view, the fields will appear in their correct locations.